Help Us Say Yes!

The benefits of my job as the head of F3’s Expansion effort are many. Trips to exotic destinations, a massive paycheck and the groupies … I could tell stories if I wasn’t sworn to secrecy…

But there is a downside to an otherwise tremendously rewarding position: I have to say no to people all the time.

The inquiries come in daily, by phone and email, through Twitter and the F3Nation.com website: Can you bring F3 to (INSERT TOWN HERE)? If we responded to every request, we would launch at least three new cities and towns each week.

But we can’t do that, which is the result of years of trial and error around Expansion. We’ve failed or fallen short of our goal on multiple occasions, but we’ve always learned from those failures.

One of the main lessons we’ve learned: a poorly executed plant is approximately four times harder to fix after the fact vs. what it would have taken to do it right in the first place. So now, we only plant new locations with a plan and a purpose.

We only launch in places where F3 men can lead the first three to six workouts and have an opportunity to teach the F3 culture to the men in the new location.

That can be frustrating for people eager to launch F3. They tell us that what we do looks pretty simple (it is!), so why should they have to wait for guys to get on a plane to come teach them how to do this really simple thing that mainly seems to involve running around a parking lot in the dark and doing burpees?

It turns out that while F3 is really simple on the surface, there’s actually a lot of nuance to how and why we do things. Stuff that seems small – and maybe even disposable – to guys who don’t know any better. Stuff like the Circle of Trust that ends every workout. Or writing a Backblast about what happened at the workout. Or why we work out rain or shine.

If a workout is going to bear the F3 name and be advertised on the website, we need a chance to teach that stuff to the guys leading it.

That is true regardless of whether you are completely new to F3 or whether you are an existing F3 guy who has moved to a new place that doesn’t have F3 and wants to start it in his new location — what we call a Mustard Seed.

If you’re in this position, we’ve got a program to support you in starting and building F3 in your area. Please use the Contact Us page and select “Expansion,” which will allow you to contact the guy who leads those efforts.

Finally, we are working on a form that will allow you to vote on where you think we should take F3 next. Look for that on this site soon.